What in God's name is 'marketing'?

This question takes me back to college days when on the first day of my BBM course, Prof. Dikshit made us write this down. "Marketing is either identifying a business opportunity and fulfilling it or creating an opportunity and fulfilling it." I remember this clearly not coz he told us that this is important and made us write it down but for the fact that this was his second statement made to the class at large on Day 1 of our graduate college lives. The first one being, "Welcome to BBM, I am sorry to say that choosing BBM is the biggest mistake of your lives. The course has no focus on anything and doesnt help you specialize in anything, you were much better off choosing a B.Com." When a seasoned prof starts his class with that kind of an opening line, it's bound to get you thinking. That I did.

In my opinion, marketing is the most misunderstood functions ever. For the layman, it has something to do with advertising. For the mis-informed it is what we call Marcom. For a large part of my relatives it is Sales. For most sales professionals it is their next career move. I've even heard (unintentional evaesdropping) random grocery shoppers requesting tele-callers saying, "please call me later I am marketing right now!" *sigh* Amongst all this mish-mash we marketeers face, is there room for what it means to us?

Most of us remember some definitions else we always have google to the rescue. I googled this one from The Chartered Institute of Marketing that defines marketing as "the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably." A different concept is of "Value-based marketing" which states that the role of marketing is to contribute to increasing "Shareholder value". In this context, marketing is defined as "the management process that seeks to maximize returns to shareholders by developing relationships with valued customers and creating a competitive advantage."

Marketing has a multitude of components like Customer Orientation, Marketing Planning, New Product Development, Sales, Marketing Communications, Brand, Market Research, Consumer Behaviour, MIS, Maketing Mix, Product Life Cycles, Customer Relationship Management and a whole lot more.

Lets cut to the chase, if marketing is all of the above and more, how close is it to the concept / defn of business? Pretty close. Where does the line fade out? Ooh, toughie. If that is how close marketing is to business and all of us either build businesses or work with organizations that are business units then should the marketing folks not be driving your "business"? Does that make all marketing folks specialists at every business function? Do the marketing folks need to know every function? Well, the answers to these questions are tough and if not anything else, they should at least make us think about one thing, is 'marketing' in its true sense limited to the marketing folks only or are we, irrespective of our silos, contributors to it?

Despite all this, organizations often fail to clearly define what they expect from their marketing teams. Worse, they fail to define marketing for themselves.


I'd like to end this post with a quote from an authority on the topic.

“Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result, that is, from the customer's point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise”. - Drucker